Stockpile Stewardship

The National Nuclear Security Administration will be submitting to Congress by the end of this month a plan for transforming the U.S. nuclear weapons complex "into a modern, efficient and responsive 21st century Nuclear Security Enterprise," Energy Secretary Steven Chu said this morning at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. Specifically:

This Stockpile Stewardship and Management Plan provides the multi-decade investment strategy needed to extend the life of key nuclear weapon systems, rebuild and modernize our facilities, and provide for necessary physical and intellectual infrastructure.

InsideDefense.com reported in April that Pentagon acquisition chief Ashton Carter had asked the Defense Science Board to assess U.S. nuclear treaty monitoring and verification technologies:

"During the coming years, the United States is expected to engage in a series of treaty negotiations on nuclear weapons and nuclear forces," Carter writes in an April 26 terms-of-reference memo. "In addition, the rapid growth in nuclear power worldwide will likely stress the implementation practices of existing material control agreements, as well as poise more nations with the ability to acquire nuclear weapons of their own.

"Monitoring and verification measures are an integral part of all the existing, modified or new agreements," Carter's memo continues. "Potential requirements for new or expanded monitoring and verification requirements place a renewed focus -- after almost two decades of limited investment -- on the adequacy of the nation's technical tools to support monitoring and verification, both as part of the cooperative verification regimes of the treaties and through national intelligence."

Consequently, Carter wants a DSB task force to study the future of nonproliferation and arms control agreements "and the environments in which they might be implemented (for example, the level of transparency and cooperation that will be desired/required in post-Cold War arms control agreements, including treaties among nuclear states in addition to the United States and Russia)." Additionally, the task force should predict "the demands and challenges placed on existing agreements enforced by the International Atomic Energy Agency with the growth in nuclear power over the next 15 to 20 years, and assess the adequacy of current practices and resources to maintain confidence that inspected nations remain nonproliferators."

Carter also calls on the board to study the possibility of adapting current technologies from other applications like ISR systems used in finding improvised explosive devices; stockpile stewardship; nuclear forensics and attribution; nuclear weapons effects; and nuclear defense and interdiction programs.